Tommy’s dad was a big, burly man who, nevertheless, liked to grow roses in his small Falkirk garden. He’d stopped going to church after a falling out with the minister. He associated the Presbyterians with the rich and Liberals; that party, he said, was made up of “conniving hypocrites” and was no friend to working people, a view Tommy adopted himself. Tom Douglas had left school at thirteen to begin work and, just as he had been the first in his family to change politics, for his son he aspired to something different from an iron moulder’s life. He wanted an education for the boy, and freedom from the restrictions of Great Britain’s rigid class system. He began to think about life in “the colonies.”
The Douglases hadn’t been in Canada for more than three years before the First World War broke out and Tom, as a British reservist, was called back to duty, joining an ambulance unit. The rest of the family, rather than stay in Canada without a breadwinner, sailed back to Scotland on the Pretoria, travelling without lights through U-boat-infested waters – a thrilling trip for a ten-year-old boy. They took up residence in Glasgow with Annie Douglas’s parents, the Clements.
Tommy’s grandfather Andrew Clement was a teamster who drove a delivery wagon for a co-operative market and was a great supporter of the co-op movement that, years later, the grandson would champion in Saskatchewan.
Tommy’s future as an amateur boxer began to make itself evident when he began school.
Like many boys around the world, he had to contend with bullies. On his first day, he set off for the Scotland Street School decked out in gartered knickers and a little porkpie hat, regular attire for Canadian schoolboys of the day. As he passed a corner that was the territory of a tough gang, he was met with gales of laughter. “Hey, Canuck,” the boys yelled, and one of them knocked off his hat. Tommy was small but his years in an out of hospital had made him somewhat immune to pain – and pugnacious as hell. When a big boy called Geordie Sinclair told him to jump, Tommy refused.
“Do it or I’ll belt you,” Geordie said, but Tommy stood his ground – and got a bloody nose.
Although Tommy punched Geordie right back, in the tussle that followed he was no match for the bigger boy.
Just the same, the next day, after school, Tommy went looking for Geordie and his chums. Taking a deep breath, he issued a challenge: “If you haven’t had enough, I’ll give you some more. Are you ready?”
Sometimes bluff works. And grit.
Instead of kicking the tar out of Tommy, or bursting into laughter, Geordie Sinclair was impressed. “You’ve had enough, Canuck,” he declared.
Tommy wasn’t bothered anymore, and he and Geordie became pals.
His leg healthy and pain free, Tommy was able to fully enjoy his childhood for the first time. Though he was no great shakes at his studies, after graduating from elementary school he enrolled in a private high school academy. He became close to his grandfather and spent many hours helping him on his rounds and caring for his horses. In his spare time, Tommy would often go to church, not because he was particularly religious, but to listen in fascination to the preachers. And he and a pal, Tom Campbell, loved nothing better than a Sunday afternoon jaunt to Glasgow Green, where they would listen to a succession of socialists and other soapbox speakers railing against the establishment.
But he was an obedient boy himself. “I didn’t rebel because there was nobody to rebel against,” he recalled.
With his dad away in the war, money was tight and Tommy took a series of part-time jobs to pay his way at school. What he really wanted to do was go to sea as a sailor, but he was too young. One of his best jobs was as a soap boy in a barbershop, working evenings and all day Saturday, rubbing soap into the bristly whiskers of men waiting for a shave, for which he earned six shillings a week plus tips. He was a likable boy and did well with the tips – at Christmas, he made an extra two pounds, a lot of money for a thirteen-year-old.
The next summer, he got a job in a cork factory, for thirty shillings a week. The owner took a liking to Tommy, and soon he was promoted to office work, at three pounds a week, more than his father had ever earned in the iron works! Tommy was getting on so well at the factory that he didn’t bother going back to school in the fall, which made his father blow his top when he came home on leave.
But the war was almost over, and Canada was calling to the family again. On New Year’s Day 1919, with Tommy just having turned fourteen, the family set sail once more. This time, they would be in Canada for good.
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library from Maclean’s, June 1952
From a rooftop, Tommy Douglas and a friend watch the violence that marks the end of the Winnipeg General Strike on “Bloody Saturday,” June 21, 1919.
2
Boxing Rings and Grease Paint
June 21, 1919 – “Bloody Saturday.” A front page photo in the paper this evening shows vividly a climactic moment in the violence that marks the end of the Winnipeg General Strike.
It’s a panoramic view of Main Street in the throes of a riot. The famous streetcar the strikers overturned and set ablaze is over there, and there, at the left, lies the body of a man gunned down by police. Crowds mill in the background and on the sides.
The photo is dominated by a troop of uniformed RCMP officers, charging down the street on their horses and brandishing clubs.
And over there, slightly above the centre, you can just make out the shapes of two figures on a rooftop, watching the horrific scene, never to be forgotten, unfold before them.
The two are fourteen-year-old Tommy Douglas and a friend.
“We were too stupid to be scared up there,” Tommy remembered. “We were just excited by it all.”
Tommy and his mother and two sisters had arrived back in Winnipeg early in the year and rented a house on Gordon Street, not far from where they’d lived a few years earlier. Tom Douglas, still not mustered out of the army, would follow in a few months. Anne Douglas got a job at the Singer sewing machine factory. Tommy had every intention of honouring his father’s wishes and returning to school, but, for the moment, money was tight, and he too went to work.
So it was that he and another boy, Mark Talnicoff – who would later marry Tommy’s sister Annie – were delivering copies of a newspaper in the Market Square near city hall on that Saturday afternoon when they heard the commotion. The two boys shimmied up a pole and made it to the roof of a two-story building on Main Street near the corner of Williams Street, right in the heart of the tumult, just as shots started to ring out. Police fired in the air at first, and several bullets whizzed by the boys’ heads. They ducked, scared and exhilarated, but they didn’t turn and run.
From their vantage point, they could see everything: the streetcar tipped over, the fighting, the charge of the Mounties, the shootings and clubbings that left two men dead and many others wounded. It was the culmination of the city’s – and country’s – first ever general strike, then in its thirty-eighth day, and would break the strike’s back. Scores of strike leaders were rounded up over the next few days, including the Douglas family’s pastor, James Woodsworth, and several of them were tried and sent to prison.
Tommy remembered the scene this way: “We saw the mounted police and the men who had been taken in as